


Give & Take Ch.22

by kinfic2



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 16:54:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11235213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinfic2/pseuds/kinfic2
Summary: “Save us...not all the prayers in the world could save us.” S.Nicks





	Give & Take Ch.22

_“I used to stand so tall. I used to be so strong. Here I am once again, barely hanging on  
                                                       But you won’t get to see the tears I cry behind these hazel eyes.”_ _©Gottwald/Sandberg_

  
       “You are one huge pain in the ass!” Justin spat out the words like cherry pits. In the strictest sense of the word, they weren’t arguing. It was more like a heated discussion. No, that wasn’t right.  They _were_ arguing, going in circles for hours without a resolution. He had a sinking feeling there wasn’t going to be one.  
  
       “So you've mentioned more than once.”  
  
        Why did they, why did _he_ continue to put himself through the taking without giving, the asking without receiving? How could two people be so close and yet so far apart? God knows he wanted to make it work, but it couldn’t be all one-sided. He wrapped his arms around his middle in a protective hug. ”Don’t, Brian, all right? Just don’t!”  
  
**“Two separate, distinct personalities, not separate at all, but inextricably bound, soul and body and mind, to each other. How did we get so far apart so fast?”**   J.Guest  
  
                                                                                                  * * *  
       “Don't what?” Fuck! Brian didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to do any of this. It wasn’t going to accomplish anything. He was a fucking idiot to think it could. They weren't able to do it in the past. Why should they be able to do it now?  
  
        Everything sounded so different in Warren’s office. The bullshit had almost made sense, neatly gift-wrapped in logic and understanding with a huge fucking bow of emotion as the crowning glory. He should have listened to his gut. They hadn’t even gotten down and dirty yet. They were still shoveling off the top layer of shit. How many more rounds could he endure before conceding defeat or declaring victory. Either way, he was going to lose.  
  
       “In case you haven’t noticed, Mr. Kinney, we have a huge fucking problem! You're the one who said ‘maybe we should talk,’ but all I'm hearing is the same bullshit. I’m tired of excuses and platitudes! Say something original for a change! Don't patronize, don’t joke, don’t trivialize—”  
  
       “All right! I fucking get it!” He hurled his empty water bottle across the room. Both flinched at the grating clatter and stared as the plastic container crackled on the hardwood floor before landing in the corner.  
  
       “You don't! That’s the problem! You don’t get it! You don’t get me and you don’t get us!” As if in defeat, Justin said in a more subdued tone, “How could you? You still won't even admit there _is_ an us!”  
  
**There wasn’t supposed to be such a scene. There wasn’t supposed to be such a fuss.  
                                             **Didn’t you know it wasn’t you or me? Didn’t you know there was only an us?**  
  
                                                                                              * * *  
       ** When Brian said they should talk, he was stunned and briefly indulged in cautious optimism. But now? It was the same old shit, a pathetic retread of every disagreement they had or didn't have. Even worse, they were doing what they seemed to do best—hurt.  
  
       In retrospective moments, he couldn't help but wonder if they were a ticking time bomb from the beginning, its fuse unknowingly lit by the glow of a street lamp. But instead of going out with a bang, they were fizzling and sputtering into a funeral pyre stacked with ashes of disappointment and regret.  
  
       He tugged at his hair. “Fuck it! I can’t do this anymore. I can't! I had hoped that somehow we could work it out, but there's just too much—too much of you, too much of me and not enough of us.”  
  
       He’d been running on autopilot for weeks, burnt out from fatigue and worry about the future, but the unresolved tension of the past few days pushed him over the edge. He needed something to hold on to, and it was becoming increasingly clear there wasn't. That he couldn’t weather this latest storm hurt. A lot. But he had to accept the inevitable—the climate was never going to change.  
  
                                                                      _“When the rain fell and the flood came_  
_and the wind blew hard like a hammer on these walls,_  
_there is a time to face stormy weather.”_ _©_ _Scorpions_  
  
      “I’m so fucking tired! I tried to be who you wanted, who you needed, but I don’t have it in me any more. No matter how much I love you and I _do_ love you, even though the Kinney Survival Guide says that’s a fate worse than death, I don't have anything left to give.”  
  
       When Brian crossed the room with a catlike stride and grabbed his arms, he took an instinctive step back, stung by the fire in the hazel eyes. “That’s your solution for everything, isn’t it? The classic Kinney move!”  
  
       His voice turned hard and cold as he stabbed with his arms outstretched. “What do you want to do, Brian? You want to fuck us out of this? It's what you do best. You’re so good at bringing me, _us_ down to the level you think _you_ deserve. If you keep it physical and degrade what we have to just fucking, you never have to feel anything right? Right? Damnit, answer me! At least give me that much!”  
  
       He could see the conflict, feel the confusion, but when Brian retreated behind his protective mask of a tightened jaw and blank eyes, he instinctively knew the battle was over. And so was the war.  
  
      “You’re a fucking coward!” His blue eyes smoked in outrage. _Do something, Brian! For fuck sake, do something to make me stay!_ **  
  
                                                                                            * * *  
  **                       
        Brian remained stoic throughout the diatribe, but the knifelike outburst hurt more than anything said so far. Weighed down by the vitriolic accusations, his shoulders sagged. He never considered himself a coward, but in the face of Justin’s anger, he wanted to shrink and disappear. The physical closeness to the man was suffocating. Although part of him screamed to fling open the windows, he listlessly padded toward them.  
  
        Underneath his guilt and pain was a growing sense of shame. Everything Justin said was true. He couldn’t let himself feel because he wouldn’t. It was a conscious decision on his part, one that sent Justin scurrying to the fiddler. He never said the words he wanted to hear and never did romance—on purpose. If he said and did those things, not only would Justin know how much he cared, he’d also have to admit it to himself and run the risk of getting hurt. Again. It was bad enough when he was a kid, but now? He didn’t know if he was strong enough. Maybe he _was_ a coward if he couldn’t handle something so normal, something that people dealt with all the time.  
  
_“My mind is full of secrets I’m too afraid to tell. My body’s full of longing for you to know me well.”_ _H. Nova_         
  
        Warren’s voice echoed in his head _._ _It’s the worst kind of risk because there are no guarantees._ Everything he had figured out about him during their session was true. Whatever he did or said was filtered through the lens of his upbringing. How could it not be? He was always remembering, always reminding himself that relationships could destroy people and poison them with its malevolence.  
  
_“You say that we can keep our love alive. Babe, all I know is what I see._  
                                                  _The couples cling and claw And drown in love’s debris._ _©C.Simon_  
  
        With childlike confidence, he thought his parents would come to their senses and see what they were doing to each other and their kids, but reality eroded the ‘if onlys’ and ‘maybes’ of childhood and forced him to accept the painful truth that what he wanted wasn't important.  
  
        He wished he had the right words, the ones Justin needed to hear, the ones he deserved to hear, but he couldn't find them. Instead, he gave him what he had. At this point, it didn’t seem to matter.  
  
       “Do whatever the fuck you have to do to live your own life. Feel whatever you have to feel to make things right in your own mind about this. You have to look out for you,” he said, his voice flat. “For the record? I’m too much of a bastard to wish that you never came into my life, that we never had what we did.”  
  
                                                                                               * * *  
        Stunned by the emotionless speech, Justin shook his head. That was it? He hadn't expected the end to happen so fast. “Unfuckingbelievable! I have been so fucking stupid! It really is kind of fucked up, isn’t it? You never mean what you say and never say what you mean, and I’m always playing catch up, trying to figure both out.”  
  
        He had no idea what Brian was thinking because he kept his back to him. Overwhelmed, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.  
  
_“If you could read my mind love, what a tale my thoughts could tell.”_ _G.Lightfoot_  
  
        He grabbed his hastily packed duffle bag and stumbled toward the door. The inescapable truth of what was happening pierced his heart like a burning arrow, sending shards of white-hot pain into every crevice of his body.  
  
        It wasn’t as if he never imagined this happening. He did. Every day. It was one of his nightmares and always played out against a teasing background of a happy life together—veiled scenes of what could have been, but now, never would be. He had always held out hope that they would be infinite in a finite world.  
  
_“Like a wheel within a wheel, Never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel  
                                       Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.”_ _©Bergman,Bergman,Legrand_  
  
                                                                                             * * *  
        Brian barely heard Justin’s last words. The non-stop chatter in his head was deafening, a broken record of his pathetic life, repeating incessantly until Warren's voice interrupted and stopped the playback. _A big puff of smoke ...emotional fraud...fucking lie...destroys you...shell with nothing inside...until you emotionally die...Is that what you want...unfeeling zombie...walking dead...alone...alone._  
  
        He had crammed his life with the crap that was supposed to make him happy but it was all worthless. Maybe it was true about human nature. People wanted what they couldn’t have.  
  
                                                                                              * * *  
        Justin turned around one last time, snapping picture after picture with his mind’s eye, forever etching them in his brain. Someday when it didn’t hurt as much, when the knife didn’t penetrate as deep, he’d be able to view the mental scrapbook through an unfiltered lens of time and distance. But he had no clue when that would be. The final picture was of a man standing alone in front of floor-to-ceiling windows, the man he loved, the man he always would love.  
**  
****He was my North, my South, my East, my West, my working week and Sunday rest,**  
**My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song. I thought that love would last forever.**  
**I was wrong.** W.H. Auden  
                                 
                                                                                              * * *  
        The plaintive cries and wretched groans of the loft door creaking shut echoed throughout the loft like a mournful dirge, but the melody had no effect on the marble statue of a man who gazed into a chasm of nothingness—endless days and nights of all the tomorrows without the one person who needed to be there. It wasn’t the shadows of memories past that hurt the most. It was the mist of an unknown future that swirled like a restless ghost.  
  
        As he stared at the bleakness of his future, a softly muttered curse escaped, a verbal preface to a sentence that would be one of the most important he would ever utter. The anguished words sounded as if they had been wrung from the depths of his soul. “I'm getting help.” He wasn’t aware that he’d spoken them out loud—to an empty loft.  
  
_“This mountain I must climb, feels like a world upon my shoulders._  
                                               _Can’t stop now. I’ve traveled so far to change this lonely life._  
                                                _I’ve got nowhere left to hide.”_     _©M.Jones_

CONTINUED HERE: <http://archiveofourown.org/works/11521104>

 


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